The Demon Child and His Modern Fate: Reconstructing the Nezha Myth in Animated Fabulation

Emerging from the 17th-century Chinese classic Fengshen yanyi (Creation of the Gods), a generic mixture of myth, folklore, history and legend, Nezha, a 7-year-old superboy who is decreed by fate to return his own flesh and bones to his parents and unyieldingly confront paternal authority in combat, has been popularized as an unconventional hero in animated adaptations since the 1970s. This article examines the cultural and historical significance of Nezha’s changing fate in the three Chinese animated feature films produced thus far: Nezha Conquers the Dragon King (Wang et al., 1979), Nezha (Jiaozi, 2019) and New Gods: Nezha Reborn (Zhao, 2021). The author argues that Nezha’s variations of personal individuation reflect China’s shifting historical contexts, changing intergenerational relations and reconfigured notions of selfhood by presenting an existential paradox of fate and freedom of action that ultimately preserves the social systems of patriarchy and filial piety, and puts forward a negotiated compromise between social collectivism and individualism. Combining theories of intertextual aesthetics with Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of fabulation, the study proposes a conceptual framework of ‘animated fabulation’ to account for the profound interaction between the literary and the cinematic, the social and the mythic, with a detailed analysis of the aesthetic and socio-political entanglements in the three animated adaptations.